For those who enjoyed the first two episodes of the Fresh interviews with early-stage tech entrepreneurs, here is the third episode with Wefinance Co-Founder about building a P2P social lending platform:

Sharing a very simple, but handy mental math rule that was mentioned in quite a few of our MBA classes, such as Investment Styles and Strategies, Designing Financial Models that Work and others:

If you want to quickly ballpark the # of years it will approximately take for an investment to double, then just divide 72 by the annual growth rate. For example, if your investment grows 7% a year, it will take slightly more than 10 years for it to double (72/7). But if it grows 36% a year, it will only take about two years to double (72/36).

You can read more about this “Rule of 72” on Wikipedia. Now, you now you can come across as a math genius without much effort 😉

If you are interested in tech entrepreneurship, you might like my recent experiment shooting video interviews with startup founders. For now, there is only one video, featuring my Berkeley-Haas classmate Johannes who is the Wetravel.to Co-Founder and CEO.

Without further ado:

Audio version:

Future plans:

For the first episodes, I am planning to focus on UC Berkeley MBA classmates and friends. Unlike other tech and entrepreneurial shows online, I am going to focus on “fresh” entrepreneurs who have just got started recently and are not hugely successful to the point when they only give you boring politically correct “CEO press-conference” type of answers.

Also, in terms of style, I am planning to keep it very conversational as opposed to conducting it as a formal interview. It means that sometimes we will be talking about a bunch of things unrelated to business, such as music, books or life in general, just like we would when meeting friends to catch up.

But in particular, I liked the fact that Haas ranks well on the “Student evaluation” axis, it is #2 in “Students’ evaluation of career services” and quite high overall “Student rating of the program (out of 5)”, 4.56, according to The Economist 2013 rankings.

I really want to add “people” to this list of Berkley-Haas strengths, but this would be probably unfair as I cannot compare to other schools as I could not know it for sure before starting the program.

The list could go on and on and on, but these are probably the main ones top-of-mind. Of course, there are drawbacks as well, but no one schools is perfect.

Let me know what you think!

MBA is not only about studying finance and accounting and solving cases, we also have multiple courses on leadership. One of them was focused on communication aspect. And as part of this course we had to deliver various two-minute speeches in front of the group of 10 people. Then, we received a feedback. Speeches were also recorded for later personal review.

Topic of each speech was different, but I found the first one the most interesting as it provoked certain self-reflection during preparation. So, I thought that you might want to try exercise by yourself. If you do not have a group of people to present in front of, just imagine an audience and record a video with a smartphone and watch it. The first topic was very simple: “Who am I?”

Also, we were given several hints or questions we might consider answering while preparing or delivering a speech:

What forces have shaped you, what real challenges have you faced?

What do you care about in life?

What’s an unexpected characteristic, or interest, or talent?

Who is most important to you?

Where are you vulnerable?

What is a long-term aspiration you hold?

And here is a couple of questions to ponder when watching your video:

Articulate what stands out for you watching your “Who Am I?” video. What are you pleased with? What do you specifically want to improve?

So, this is it. Hope, you find it helpful.

For me personally the most interesting part was to see how differently other nine people approached the same exercise.

Disclaimer

In this post I want to share my experience of preparation to GMAT test and advice on some “DOs and DON’Ts”. It will only be interesting for those who want to pass it and already know what GMAT is, what it is for, and how it is generally structured. Others will probably derive no benefit from reading this article.

So, as we assumed that you have a basic understanding of how test works (if you do not, I would recommend that you read the Wiki article about it), let us skip all the introductory information about the test and dive right into the preparation, my experience, and advice.

Full disclosure

I think, it would be fair to start with my own result to manage everybody’s expectations. Who knows, maybe some of you will leave after this part…

I took the test twice and scored exactly the same, 710. Q49 and V38 — first time and Q48 and V39 — second time. It is the 92th percentile. In other words, 92% of those who took the test did worse while 8% of them did better . Ironically, I received 6.0 out of maximum 6.0 for Analytical Writing Assessment, GMAT section I almost did not prepare for.